Common Sense

"Will the time ever come when, again, Nature become the Teacher of Man?" I come in from the woods this morning thinking about Thoreau's question. I have just spent a weekend in Northern Vermont studying animal sign and forest ecology. There was no snow there. It was very eery. No snow in the beginning of January. The woods were deep in mud because the four feet of snow from the previous week had melted in the record temperatures. We shook our heads. Global climate change.

Today as I head into the woods on the morning after a new snow, I am surprised to see snow fleas (achorutes nivicolus). These insects, also known as springtails, always seem to me a sign of spring since they emerge on the warmer winter days to feed on leaf mold. I don't usually see them in January, but then there is nothing predictable about winter anymore.

I think about Thoreau's question and the fact that it was posed in the 1840's some one hundred and seventy years ago. The natural sciences were in their infancy then. There were no computers, no doppler radar, no electron microscopes, no electricity even. What was catalogued about Nature was observed on two feet and mostly with the naked eye. Thoreau's world must have been much quieter than ours and yet he still had to retreat to Walden Pond in order "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Thoreau's question has haunted me since I first encountered it in high school when I read Walden. It is still so fresh and so real. I think of his solitary shack at Walden Pond now an island in the midst of suburban sprawl as Massachusetts loses forty acreas a day to development. I think of the species on this planet that will be extinct before we will ever know they existed, and all the manner of flora and fauna that are struggling to adapt to a new natural order as we enclose ourselves in temperature controlled environments and relate to each other through electronic keyboards.

I remember when I first gazed upon Mt. Katahdin. I had spent two months walking towards it on the Appalachian Trail and first saw the summit with sixty miles left. I was awestruck. Thoreau had a similar experience on his first encounter with Katahdin. It inspired him to write, "Think of our own life in Nature--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?"

Indeed, who are we? Where are we? Today the leaders of India and China have met. They agreed that they really have the right not to think about cutting carbon emissions because they deserve to have the same lifestyle that the more developed western societies have, and I think of Thoreau. He knew nothing of melting glaciers and too warm winters. He knew nothing of the decimation of the rain forests and the green house effect. He never heard of coral reefs bleaching or acid rain on his own northern forests. Global climate change still had more than a century to unfold. The species had yet to reach the tipping point. His voice is still a cry from the wilderness. He knew then, that in order to survive as a species, human beings need to make Nature their teacher. Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury to choose to be disconnected from the source of our own lives.

Who are we? Where are we? It's all just such common sense.